The interview takes place at Dachau. Ben Stein questions Dr. Richard Weikart (author of "From Darwin to Hitler") with the concentration camp as backdrop:
Was Hitler insane? (no)
Was Hitler evil? (yes)
Is there such a thing as evil? (yes)
Is there such a thing as good? (yes)
And evil can sometimes be rationalized as science? (yes)
And (Dr. Weikart adds), Hitler probably believed he was doing good, improving humanity.
Therefore, Intelligent Design is science.
According to Stein, "Darwinism" (the label Stein applies to those who have dismissed "Intelligent Design" as unworthy of serious intellectual consideration) has been shown -- historically and scientifically -- to lead to evil and the celebration of death, as exemplified by Naziism, the Holocaust, eugenics, abortion, euthanasia...
And that is why Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory.
Scene after scene of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" repeats this mutant species of illogic, which falls laughably short of basic scientific or mathematical standards of expression. I could quote you a hundred similar examples, but you can't really argue with the movie because it fails to put forth an argument -- any argument. OK, that's not really fair. It doesn't try.
Oddly, for a film ostensibly about how the scientific evidence supporting Intelligent Design is being suppressed, it presents no evidence, not even a hint of a case, on behalf of Intelligent Design.
Instead, it posits that Darwinism, an insidiously powerful creed that demands scientists blindly follow Charles Darwin as they would the Fuhrer, is evil, or a slippery slope at least, and that is anti-religion, anti-freedom and anti-American, not to mention flawed and incomplete.
Therefore, Intelligent Design. Period.
"What, exactly, about Intelligent Design," you might well ask. But you would get no answer. Not from this film.
"Expelled" tells us many things that Intelligent Design is not. It is not Creationism. It is not saying that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved to its current state (a common, lazy misperception). It is not religious, either, although one of the problems with Darwinism is that it's also not religious and leads to irreligion.
We do know this: Some scientists believe it and some don't, but the ones who do are discriminated against -- possibly, some say, because they are religious. We don't know what they said about Intelligent Design that got them fired or shunned, but most of them say they barely only mentioned it and why shouldn't Intelligent Design be presented as science? We don't know, because they -- the Intelligent Design Mentioners -- never tell us what they mentioned they have discovered or theorized about Intelligent Design. The Darwinians say their work was unsound science. The Mentioners dispute such claims. That is the extent of the "debate" as framed in the film.
(For reasons unknown, Stein lets the Austrian monk Gregor Johann Mendel, whose harsh natural laws regarding the inheritance of dominant and recessive genes in sweet peas made him the father of "Mendelism," off the hook completely.)
One spokesman comes close to articulating a thought about Intelligent Design:
"If you define evolution precisely, though, to mean the common descent of all life on earth from a single ancestor via undirected mutation and natural selection -- that's a textbook definition of neo-Darwinism -- biologists of the first rank have real questions...
"Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a result of intelligence."
I think there's another word for that: "tautology."
"I thought scientific disputes were settled by evidence!" says writer/narrator Stein.
Me, too.
* * * *
(If you want to, you can find the Dachau interview above, from which most of my quotations are verbatim, in the movie at roughly 1:14, according to NetFlix via TiVo.)
* For more, see Roger Ebert's blog post, "Win Ben Stein's mind."
* From Stein's Official "Expelled" Site, an opinion poll makes a compelling case:
Church cinema program? But, I thought we were talking about science, not religion.
And you know, go to this site and take a look around:
http://www.intelligentdesignanswers.com/
They used an Ann Coultier book for scientific research.
Good thing Ben Stein doesn't know anything about Erasmus Darwin, Chuck's grandfather, who was, kind of, sort of, one of the original Big Bang theorists:
Astonish'd Chaos heard the potent word: -
Through all his realms the kindly Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first;
Bend, as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses bend their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.
I mentioned this on Rogers blog about this movie, and I think it bears mentioning again.
No 90 min. film can deal with the true complexities of a debate like this one. Yes, Stein's movie has more to do with setting up straw men, and knocking them down, then actually engaging the issues. This doesn't mean, however, that the issue could truly be dealt with within the cinematic parameters of the political (scientific) essay genre. If Stein were to actually deal with the issue he presents, we'd get to see longer, uncut interviews with a wide variety of subjects from both sides of the argument, which would hopefully last up to three or four hours. In this way we'd have the time to hear lucid arguments, clarifications, and qualifications from the people who are involved at a ground level with this debate. The film is an obvious propaganda tool, and should be seen as one. But most films of this type, including those of Michael Moore, and other shockumentaries, are made only for the choir to see. A person can only have use for this type of film in so far as he or she agrees with the position of it's makers.
Even "An Inconvenient Truth" dodged the bullet by assuming the cause of global warming. Gore and co. made a great presentation of the fact of global warming, and then presented the idea that it's cause is directly liked to human behavior. Global warming may well be caused by us, but a clear debate cannot be presented in a film of that length. Gore has to spend enough time just establishing the fact that by the time he's done with that he needs to act quick before the audience grows weary. How can you get an audience to act on practical advice (like buying a hybrid car) if you bog them down with the possibility that we may have very little to do with the global warming phenomenon? At any rate, the need for environmental awareness and conservation goes well beyond global warming, and so "An Inconvenient Truth" is actually helpful on a practical level.
Heavy scientific issues like "evolution v. intelligent design" or "global warming" are better left to a seven part PBS mini series or the printed page.
I checked out the official site for Expelled, and went to: http://www.intelligentdesignanswers.com/ and found that it was a laughably vacant site. The only thing on the site is a series of links to the books used to research Expelled. And while its laudable (notice the similarity to laughable) that included in the list are all the good Anti-Creationists book, like those by Dawkins, there is actually no content in the site. I think its an interesting parallel that a site entitled: Intelligent Design Answers, does not provide any answers, itself, about intelligent design, but paws off the answers to a higher authority, Amazon.com. What a statement about a 'science' (and as a scientist myself, I use this term ironically) that intends to paw off the interesting questions to a higher authority, some intelligent designer. Basically, ID throws up its hands and says: "Something else is smarter than me, I can't wrap my brain around an answer." As does this particular site, it throws up its hands and appeals to smarter people to answer its questions for it. Neat.
The false claim that there is disagreement with the scientific community about evolution and intelligent design always reminds me of the words of the insane Captain Rum in "Blackadder."
Edmund hires Rum to sail them to France. After they set sail, they have the following conversation:
Edmund: Look, there's no need to panic. Someone in the crew will know how to steer this thing.
Rum: The crew, milord?
Edmund: Yes, the crew.
Rum: What crew?
Edmund: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.
Rum: Opinion is divided on the subject.
Edmund: Oh, really?
Rum: Yahs. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't.
JE: I'm reminded of the moment from "30 Rock" when Alec Baldwin notices water dribbling from the ceiling and mentions it to a network bureaucrat (played by Matthew Broderick), who replies: "We've looked into it and it's not."
I'm just fascinated to note that, as science fiction author James P. Hogan noted long ago (before he toodled off into Velikovskianism) that creationists say that those who accept the theory of evolution are "Darwinists", believers in an unfounded system of belief.
In other words, the worst they can say about us is that we're followers of a religion...
On NPR's "Talk of the Nation" recently, they did a show about gay marriage in which the two guests respectively defended and denounced it, specifically on religious grounds. A caller--Aaron from Boise if memory serves--put in his two cents about how the Bible is literally true, always right, and definitely against gay marriage. The host asked him what he thought about the Bible's attitude towards slavery and he replied (close approximation): "That's just something Darwin and the evolutionists came up with. They think man evolved from monkeys and the blacks were less evolved and, therefore, inferior." Yes, Darwin, born the same year as Lincoln in a country where slavery had been banned, invented slavery.
Now don't get me wrong, this was probably just a lone kook, but his words had the practiced smoothness of someone quoting a pamphlet or website or something. Nothing surprises me anymore.
Don't they just wish these were the olden days! Back when you could burn the heretics! How dare anyone choose not to believe in god. Or to believe in a different god. Or to believe in the same god in a different way. Peel away all the clever words and that's what you'll find.
Is it really fair to compare Ben Stein to Michael Moore? I mean even Michael Moore never compared Bush and Cheney to the Nazis.
In addition my uncle (a retired biology professor once put it rather succinctly, (he may have been quoting someone else) "Science isn't about being fair and balanced and presenting both sides of an issue or controversy equally. Science is about facts and if you ain't got the facts, you have no place anywhere near a science classroom."
I also enjoy the cartoon Ebert posted in his post about "Expelled". If we're going to teach intelligent design next to evolution then we have to teach alchemy alongside chemistry and astrology with astronomy.
In response to Dane Walker... In 1996, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists issued a statement, also mirrored by the National Center for Policy Analysis and the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science, that race is not a biological construct. You can find the AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race here.
These are three major science organzations emphasizing, for the sake of medical, social, etc. policy formulation, that race is *not* a biological construct... but an arbitrary sociocultural one.
On the other hand, Henry M. Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, one of the largest Creationist/ID organizations in the world, wrote in his 1991 book The Beginning of the World:
It should be noted that the late Morris had not published a single peer reviewed paper in the past 30 years, and that none of his field research concerned any branch of any of the life sciences. It is not because of any conspiracy in the peer-reviewed journals against Creationism... It is because he was not a life scientist. He was a hydraulic engineer whose field work did not concern anything ever remotely connected to evolutionary biology.
I agree with Tom F.
Science = Fact
Organized Religion = Superstition
Stein should stick to acting.....Bueller? Bueller? :')
I find it interesting that the author of this article raves about the lack of true evidence in the film, while presenting no evidence to corroborate his statements. One piece of evidence I did gather from the film was the inability of the scientists interviewed (such as Richard Dawkins) to give any substantial answer to the question "where did it all begin?" Where did the first, the original, the beginning, come from? The very first organism evolved? From what? Nowhere in any document I have researched, in any theory or experimentation et. that did not involve intelligent design is there an answer to this question. It seems the logical choice. Something had to have been created, pardon my use of such a taboo phrase. When all other options and theories fail to give answer, you must then accept the one that seems illogical, that is logic. That is science, that is method.
One last thing, I noticed a comment about propaganda, about the film only showing what supported the argument. I then noticed the disclaimer about comments stating that it must first be approved, before it will appear. I have no problem with that. If the founders of this site do not wish to show the comments of some to better support their articles, so be it. It is their right to do so and I support it, however, I think they might rethink their take on propaganda before enforcing said rule.
JE: How did it all begin? The most obvious answer is this: "There is not enough evidence yet to answer that question -- and may never be." Science is not afraid of uncertainty. As for comment approval, that's a policy restriction enforced for legal reasons by the Chicago Sun-Times.